Sunday, October 21, 2012

Same question as the one for conservatives: I'm looking for liberals in history, especially the second half of the twentieth century, who are overlooked, underappreciated or underrated. Politicians especially, but of course you're free to include anyone you like.

27 comments:

Philip Burton is nearly forgotten now, outside the Bay Area, but in his time he was one of the most powerful liberals in Congress.

Hubert Humphrey, obviously, isn't exactly forgotten, but the latter half of his career when he was hated by many liberals tends to overshadow the first half, when he was one of the first mainstream champions of civil rights.

As much as I respect Humphrey, I read opeds like Perlstein's and think that Humphrey was lucky not to be elected president, so that no one would ever have to have been disappointed in the inevitable compromises that come with actually governing.

Ed Muskie; Senator, presidential candidate, and author of the Clean Air and Water acts.

We're at the 40th anniversary of the Clean Water Act.

I grew up (and still live) along the same river that runs through the town where Muskie was born; my family's farm hugging it's shore for nearly a mile. It was one of the ten most-polluted rivers in the country 40 years ago. If you fell in, they took you to the emergency room. Nobody fished it, swam in it, canoed on it. Houses next to it had their pant peel. Animals who lived on it were sickly and deformed. It had frequent fish kills, was choked in brown foam, and stank of rotten eggs.

Today, you can swim in it; at least down to the point where aging sewer systems results in CSOs (Combined Sewer Overflows) during heavy rains. It's home to one of the best bass fisheries in the northeast. Where wildlife was scarce and ill, there are otters and bald eagles and heron and turtles.

But if you take old timers, folk my age or older down to the shore, and they won't go in for a swim; they still remember how bad it as. And while they admit to its improvement, they still don't trust it, though it's pretty easy to convince them to canoe a bit of it. Younger people and tourists who come for the Maine Wood recreation the river offers simply don't believe how bad it was; they think you're telling them wild tales.

This breakdown in comprehending progress bothers me; too.

The Supreme Court ruled that the Clean Air Act can be used to regulate carbon emissions, crucial to combating climate change in the face of a political body still living in denial.

Muskie's legacy, the Clean Air and Water acts and the EPA, altered the path we were on. If pollution doesn't seem like a big political problem today, it's because of the Muskie's success. And I hope that success isn't also the root of eventual failure, because we've forgotten, because we take clean water and air for granted.

Without taking anything away from Manny Celler, perhaps his final contribution to liberalism in particular and American public life in general was getting lazy in 1972 and taking a primary challenge from Liz Holtzman for granted.

Holtzman upset Celler by a few hundred votes. That moved Peter Rodino into the chairman's seat of the Judiciary Committee just as the Watergate investigation was picking up steam.

Unlike the at-times dictatorial Celler, Rodino was a soft-spoken consensus builder who played a key role in securing the votes of conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans for the Nixon impeachment resolutions.

"The liberals in the House strongly resemble liberals I have known through the last two decades in the civil rights conflict. When it comes time to show on which side they will be counted, they excuse themselves."

George McGovern has been an object of ridicule - symbol of a soft-headed liberalism that did not exist - and certainly did not describe him. He was firmly against the Vietnam War when it was not easy. He democratized the Democratic Party - which had become possible because conservative white southern Democrats had left it. Today on the occasion of his death we should recognize that he gets much too little credit for being right.

The obvious one today is George McGovern. I am still proud he was my first vote for President, and that I carried a "Don't Blame Me, I'm From Massachusetts" sticker on my guitar case for years afterwards.

He was a classic liberal: logical, reasonable, decent and compassionate, and certain that the government can be an instrument of justice and compassion. And on Vietnam, he simply was right.

He was a stalwart public servant for years after his 1972 defeat, and even approaching 90 he wrote an eloquent statement in his last book about the core meanings of liberalism in the 21st as well as the 20th century.

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